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0:08
Hi everyone and welcome! The reason I'm talking about this, learning in praxis, here in the middle of the theory videos, is that a lot of this goes into cognitivism. So it makes sense to have it in relation to that, I will also touch upon and explain concepts that are relevant in later videos. In this video, I will talk about things that I think are very important to have a basic understanding about when working with teaching, or just to understand your own learning as well. In
0:42
the video at cognitivism, we talked about memory: the long-term memory - the storage, where we store things in schemas, the working memory - with its slots, and now we will go a bit deeper into this.
1:00
The long-term memory. The long-term memory can actually be divided into two main systems: explicit and implicit memory. As you might remember, I talked about how schemas can be for things like information - like what is a role playing game, or behaviors - like rolling dice.
1:22
Explicit memories are like the schemas for role-playing games. They are memories that are consciously available, like facts, specific events in time or personal memories. Implicit memories are things that you can do without active thought, like movement of the body using objects and associations, and it also includes classical conditioning. Remember?
1:51
Here we find things like the schema for rolling dice.
1:56
When we learn these types of skills that relate to implicit memories, we usually need to break them up into smaller pieces first, and then the more we practice, the less effort they will take. For example, if you for a larp tries to learn how to fight with foam swords, so-called boffer fighting,
2:19
it is very hard in the start. You need to think about exactly how you stand, how you move and how to even hold the sword. But the more you do it, the easier it gets, and after a while, you can do it without even thinking about it. And instead, focusing on your opponents and your surroundings,
2:40
it becomes automated.
2:44
This also includes things like simple multiplications or recognizing words.
2:52
But how big is a long-term memory then? Well, we haven't found a stop yet.
3:00
But if that is the case, then why do we forget things? Well, maybe we don't? Studies have shown that when we think we have forgotten something totally, it takes a shorter amount of time to relearn it than it did the first time we got the material presented. And this indicates that we actually don't forget it once we learned it.
3:24
And if we learn something and then forget it and then relearn it, it actually gets encoded stronger.
3:36
The working memory. Here we have cognitive load,
3:42
the amount of information that the working memory can hold at one time. Remember? And we have chunking, the largest unit of information we could recognize.
3:52
So when chunking, highly practiced schemas actually take less space in the working memory. And if it is automated, it barely takes any space at all.
4:08
But what then happens when we run out of slots?
4:14
This is when we get cognitive overload. We are now back to me trying to play Star Wars the role-playing game, and trying to learn the system, trying to remember what skills to use, what each of them has as a dice pool, what modifiers they're all from my background or artifacts, modify bonuses added by this specific fight, while I'm also trying to figure out what I want to do in this scene, and where the story is heading. And here I have been out of slots for a little while already.
4:46
This is why a lot of computer games start with very basic skills and then you get to learn as you go. If you got everything at once you would get cognitive overload and you wouldn't be able to process the information.
5:01
So to make sure the information you want to get through actually gets through, you need to consider cognitive overload.
5:09
If you then want to use the Star Wars role-playing game to teach math, the students need to handle all the things I mentioned here, and then also math on top of it. So the risk of cognitive overload gets really high if you're not used to the system. When designing you need to consider how much new info there is for the players to take in. And sometimes it is better to keep it simpler, especially when it comes role-playing games and larps for educational purposes.
5:43
Since then, you want them to be able to take away the specific learning goals.
5:51
Auditory info and visual/spatial info is processed in different of the working memory. Auditory info is processed in the phonological loop and visual/spatial info in the visual/spacial scratchpad.
6:08
This means that if you have visual information and auditory information together, it takes less space than if you had two pieces of auditory information.
6:21
If you need to use same part of the working memory at once, that can quickly lead to cognitive overload.
6:32
When reading words, they are actually transformed into phonemes and handled by the phonological loop, that auditory part auditory part of the working memory. This means that if you have a PowerPoint with a lot of text while also talking, the listeners will either stop reading the text or stop listening to you.
6:56
Then there might be other reasons to have a lot of text, like being able to only use the PowerPoint without the presenter, or to be able to pause a video without having to listen to the whole presentation. So there are reasons to do that, but you should be aware of the cost.
7:16
Another part of the working memory is the episodic buffer.
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And this is the link between the working memory and long-term memory. This can also help with chunking, since if we connect the new information with an existing schema, then it takes less space.
7:38
Sometimes we want to teach things and it turns out the learning doesn't work as intended. Why is this? Well, they can be many reasons for this. Some of them are: Faulty incorporation, I talked about how adding things to the wrong schema might make us learn the wrong thing. Like adding role-playing games to fantasy fiction books instead of to games.
8:13
It takes less energy to just assimilate new knowledge than it does to accommodate a schema. So therefore we will try to just add things to existing schemas before we try to change them. And this means we sometimes might distort the information to make it fit rather than using the extra energy needed for accommodation.
8:37
We then have faulty pre-knowledge. If we have faulty incorporated something, this will affect later learning, since learning is about adding to and connecting to previous knowledge. So if that previous knowledge is wrong, we will keep building structures that are wrong even if the new information itself is correct. And this is why one of the most vital parts of learning new information is what we already know. Then of course, we have the cognitive overload. That we are so
9:15
overloaded that we are unable to process all the information and we will miss vital parts. Or maybe we're so overwhelmed that we shut down completely and then we don't learn anything.
9:31
Then there is the information defence. Learning, new things require energy. When information comes in, we can either incorporate it or we can reject it. In our everyday life the ability to reject information is important, it protects us from the bombardment of information we are constantly exposed to.
9:53
It's a sort of defense against learning that is needed to not run out of energy. Even if it's sometimes blocks us when we wouldn't want it to.
10:06
Then we also have identity defence. To protect our sense of self we also have a strong defence called the identity defence. It helps us keep our experience of being a unique individual and our sense of self. And once it's triggered, it can make us reject any learning. And this is why it's so hard to change someone's worldview. And this is why transformative learning is not something that happens easily and it's hard to design for. In role-play
10:39
we have characters that gives us an alibi, and maybe, alibi can actually help with not triggering the identity defence and therefore help us explore things more openly.
10:53
From the outside it can be really hard to say which of these that is happening, and sometimes many are involved at the same time. Maybe you didn't listen fully because your information defence had kicked in so you missed something important at the start that leads to that when you hear things later, they don't really make sense.
11:16
And maybe you also have faulty pre-knowledge and then what is presented might not make sense in relation to that. And when trying to understand it, you just get cognitive overload and then shut down.
11:31
When teaching or designing, it is important to know about this. And this is also why in educational role playing games, the educational processing becomes so important. so you can catch if someone had any type of defence activated, or misunderstood any information, and help them work with that.
11:54
So now you know a bit more about how to create memories and how they are stored.
12:02
But it is not enough
12:07
to just have them stored and learn them well, you also need to be able to retrieve the memory when you need it. You have probably been in that situation when you are talking with a friend and you want to tell them about this game you just played, you just can't remember the name of it. I mean, you know the name, but you, you just can't reach it.
12:32
That is failing to recall the memory. So we need to both be able to store and to recall information.
12:42
So how strongly we have managed to encode the information will decide how quickly we forget the information and how fast we can relearn it, while recalling decides how good we are at accessing that information. Take chess as an example, when I play, I think my way through it, I reason.
13:06
When a professional player does it, they are not faster or better at doing that. They are instead remembering old games that they have played or seen played. They aren't reasoning, they are recalling. They are grabbing chunks from existing schemas.
13:31
When we learn something we connected it to the situation we were in when learning it. We create little cues that we connect to the information and these cues can then help us trigger a memory. Maybe the smell of fire makes you think about larp for example.
13:51
The cues are like little hooks that you can use to latch on to when you're trying to retrieve your memory.
14:00
The bad thing is that we are usually not very good at retrieving information if we are in a different context from where we learned it.
14:09
There is a classic example from the study "Mathematics in the Streets and in School" where they studied street children and could see how they could do complicated mathematical calculations out on the street in their everyday life,
14:24
but when they were put in school in a classroom, they couldn't solve the same kind of calculations.
14:32
And this relates to transfer, to being able to bring and use knowledge from one area to another. And that is something we humans tend to be pretty bad at.
14:43
And because learning is context dependent, we get a problem with transfer. Within education we talk about the "transfer problem" since this is highly relevant for teaching and learning.
14:59
The silver lining about context dependency is that when you know about it, you can use it. This is called cue dependent learning, and it can help us with memory retrieval. So if you want to learn something for a specific context, for example, you're going to a larp out in a forest, this means you should study it within a context that is as close as possible to where you need to use it. In this case: in a forest, preferably wearing your larp costume, and maybe together with your friends that
15:35
are going to the larp, because this will help with being able to recall information in the situation where you need it.
15:46
But a lot of the time when we learn something or want to teach something, we want the knowledge to be available in many contexts. We don't want school children to only be able to use what they know in the classroom, we want them to be able to use it in life, right?
16:06
So then we want them to be able to transfer it. So we want to make the knowledge less context dependent. And one way to do this is to create more cues to help us retrieve the information.
16:21
This could mean: study the information at different times of the day, in different settings, with different smells or different people, in different emotional states, and so on. The more different situations you are in, the more cues, and there is a chance that some of the cues are relevant in the context where you will need the information. So the more cues, the less context dependent the knowledge becomes.
16:50
And for me, this is super exciting in relation to role-playing games, because in role playing games, we add another layer and therefore more potential cues. So if you learned about, say geometry in a post-apocalyptic larp in a forest, you might be able to recall it when you are out taking a walk in a forest, when someone starts talking about how the world is ending, or when you hear the sound of rain, instead of only in the classroom.
17:26
And also not all things are equally hard to learn.
17:32
Evolutionary psychologists have found out that our brains seem to be better at solving problems that are important for us to survive and procreate. So things like exploring the environment or social interaction, are easier for us than reading or doing math.
17:52
We are pretty good at quickly solving fairly complex social problems, but usually have a harder time with abstract logical problems.
18:03
There are studies that show that when we are trying to solve an abstract problem on its own, it's way harder than if we take the same problem, but apply it in a social context. So taking an abstract math problem and asking people to solve it,
18:20
more people would get it right if we take it and then apply a narrative to it that is in a social context that they recognize, then if we just ask them to solve the problem itself. If you want to know more about this, I can recommend Cosmides and Tooby's work "Cognitive adoptions for social exchange". And talking about things that are easier for us humans to remember, stories!
18:52
Stories are one such thing. They seem to help us understand the causation between information and context. They also help us with meaning-making of what we learned.
19:08
And in role playing games, we not only hear stories, we create stories.
19:15
Analogies are very useful for teaching. When forming analogies, we understand how different things are similar because they share the same relational structure.
19:28
So using existing knowledge as a conceptual scaffold, to understand the new information, connecting the new information to the old one and creating connections between existing schemas. And these connections are important for transfer. Vendetti at al, actually described analogical reasoning as "the cognitive underpinning of the ability to notice and draw similarities across contexts".
20:02
This sounds a lot like transfer, don't you think?
20:08
But for an analogy to work it needs to connect to already existing knowledge, to focus on the relational, and we need to make a purposeful abstraction. And the purposeful abstraction is a conscious identification of a principle, of a main idea, a strategy, or a procedure, that is not linked to one specific situation or problem.
20:35
Analogies are really useful when using role-playing games for educational purposes.
20:41
We can use the shared role-playing experience when explaining new concepts or helping with creating connections between this specific situation and others. For educational role-playing games, this part is usually done as part of the after discussion and educational processing. So you could, for example ask, "In this larp we just played, people in this world was sorted into categories. Can you think of any situations where this happens in our world?".
21:14
And this once again highlights why the educational processing is so important.
21:24
Okay. So we just talked about how stories, analogies, and social settings can help with learning and transfer.
21:34
And, role-playing games are stories, they use analogies in the after discussion, and they are in a social context. For me, it sounds like using role playing games, with the proper facilitated after discussion, might be a good match for transfer to happen.
21:56
This is something where we need more research in the future to find out if this is true and how we can work even more with it.
22:10
Okay. Now we're going to talk about beginners and experts and how they learn differently. When you have a deep knowledge of a subject, it is easier to see the underlying unifying concepts. An expert can both generalise from, and see the specifics in a situation. They have many schemas they can connect and use. And that information is already chunked.
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For a beginner, generalising is hard. Just understanding the new thing, fills up the working memory, making it hard to access a lot of other information at the same time.
22:50
It becomes way easier to get cognitive overload.
22:55
Beginners don't have the relevant schemas yet, and therefore need to use different strategies. It's like the chess players I talked about, a beginner will try different moves in their head while an expert can just access all the previous games and pick one.
23:13
And this goes for role-playing also. Designing for experts versus beginners is different in how much info you can have in there, in relation to what you want them to learn.
23:28
Does everybody learn differently? Well, we talked about how beginners and experts learn differently, but what about the individual level? Does everyone learn differently?
23:42
You have probably heard people say things like I learn better through video, or I'm a kinetic learner, and so on. This is called learning styles. It was taken from psychology and the idea of nine types of intelligence by Howard Gardner. And then it was applied to education.
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But this has actually been tested in empirical studies and it is now debunked.
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And in studies where students got to choose their preferred way of learning,
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and then got taught only through this, the results showed that they learned the same amount or less than if they do not get your choose.
24:27
We like to do things we're good at, it saves energy. But that it's easy doesn't necessarily mean that you learn a lot. Because learning is kind of hard, it takes energy.
24:40
One could actually say teaching is more about what you're teaching than whom.
24:48
The content you want to teach will affect how you teach more than whom you teach. So for example, if you want to teach someone to boffer fight, you wouldn't ask them to read a book about it, you would have them try it out and practice physically. So we need to design our learning experiences so they match the type of content we want to teach.
25:14
Does this mean that there are no individual differences? Not really. Let me use an analogy.
25:24
People can have different preferences or needs in relation to food. This doesn't really change the basic nutritional needs that are more or less the same for everyone.
25:36
And when it comes to learning, there are things that are very general. Like what I just talked about with beginners and experts, or that we get cognitive overload. That would be the basic nutritional needs.
25:51
Then on an individual level. Some methods of teaching work better for some students in certain contexts, and some students have special needs. Just like we have different flavour preferences and some of us have allergies.
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Individual needs should be taken into account, but these needs will vary depending on many factors, like previous knowledge, what you're trying to teach, the context you are in, or the student's mental state that specific day.
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Teaching is kind of like game mastering, you can make an overarching plan and then things will happen that you need to handle on the fly.
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You might be able to prep for different scenarios so you have something to fall back on, but you can't predict exactly what will happen. So plan, prep, and learn as many tools as possible, so that when you need to improvise, you have those tools to help you.
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And with that, we are finishing up this video.
27:05
Here are my references.
27:09
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. I'll see you in the next video about constructivism and constructionism.
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